Google Drive, the company’s answer to online storage tools like Dropbox, Box.net, SugarSync and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, arrived yesterday afternoon as forecast, though with little ceremony.
It wasn’t…then suddenly it was, offering 5GB of free online,
synchronized storage, no strings attached, with competitive upgrade
prices if you need more, from 25GB on up to 1TB.
Is it worth a look? Like most freebies from companies as ubiquitous
as Google, I think so. After all, the only way to determine whether it’s
right for your particular setup is to give it a spin.
You get more free storage than Dropbox
Google Drive offers 5GB free storage, no privacy tradeoffs like
crawling your data or bothersome inline ads to worry about. Dropbox,
arguably the most popular cloud storage alternative at the moment, only
gives you 2GB free. Beyond that, the two offer similar synchronization
basics, while Google naturally offers better integration with Google’s
online products. That said, Dropbox’s simplicity of file sharing remains
superior to Google Drive’s, offering better-integrated tools to quickly
make files or folders accessible to other users (without requiring
service memberships or logins), but if you and your friends, family or
work collaborators already live in the Googlesphere, you owe it to
yourself to give Google Drive a shake.
It replaces Google Docs
Activate Google Drive and Google Docs is no more, at least as a
standalone destination: Click on your old shortcut and you’ll be
rerouted to drive.google.com,
where your ‘Documents’ folder now exists as a subset of ‘My Drive’.
Crafting a new spreadsheet or presentation now occurs by clicking a
‘Create’ button, and you can access shortcuts to your Google Docs
directly from your Google Drive — launch one and you’re automatically
routed to its Google Docs interface through your default browser. If
Google Docs is your office suite mainstay, then Google Drive is a
no-brainer.
One word: search
Upload documents, videos, PDFs, photos and more to your Google Drive
and when you search on words like “Tuesday” or “urgent,” the service
searches within each file for matches. What’s more, it uses optical
character recognition (OCR) technology to make legible text in even
scanned documents searchable (Google uses the example of an old
newspaper article). The company even claims to be able to match unnamed
photos with search terms, though it’s apparently limited to easily
recognized objects, say the Grand Canyon or Washington Monument.
It’s reasonably quick and (almost) platform agnostic
There’s no such thing as a “fast” cloud drive at this point, but
Google Drive synchronizes offline files as fast as anything else,
sometimes faster: In my tests, a 12MB image file took about two minutes
to synchronize with Google Drive, where the same image took over three
minutes using Dropbox. And Google Drive works on Windows and Mac devices
as well as Android ones out of the box, with a promised iOS client for
iPhones and iPads in the offing (if you use one of the latter, you’ll
have to wait a bit longer). Google provides native apps for each device,
making synchronization as simple as downloading the client, then
dragging and dropping files to a mount point. The service’s only
downside, if indeed this counts as one, is that it won’t sync existing
folders outside the Google Drive share (on the other hand, the upside
of having a single share point — though not unique to Google Drive — is
that it encourages first-time users to organize their volatile data
within a single location, making that data subsequently easier to find
and maintain).
You don’t have to choose
The wonderful thing about free cloud storage for the moment is that it’s truly free, no hidden gotchas (well, yet
anyway). So there’s really no reason not to avail yourself of multiple
services, say you need more than Google Drive’s 5GB, or you want
multiple backups of files, or you just want the benefits of Google’s
search and native service features but don’t want to give up Dropbox’s
sharing agnosticism and simplicity. The extra drive shares do add
a touch of clutter to your operating environment’s menubars or drive
shortcut overlays, but if you’re the sort of person who needs more than
5GB for work files or online collaboration, you’re probably already a
data-juggling pro.
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